Archive for June, 2011

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

The blog for 1-800-CEO-READ, the excellent website devoted to business books, posted last week about Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie. They lay out the relevance of design thinking for business managers, especially in product development or people management.
Here’s the scenario they use from the book to show how anyone in management can benefit from design thinking:

Now, you might be thinking, “This isn’t for me. I’m in business, not design.” Here’s a scenario the authors pose to give you a clearer idea of the relevance of this book to your work:

Consider a challenge faced by a leading consumer products firm: how to think about and respond to changes in the retail marketplace over the next ten years. Suppose that two student teams – one composed of MBAs and the other of design students – tackle the issue. How might each team approach its study?

The MBAs would likely begin by researching trends in the marketplace – social, technological, environmental, and political. They’d read analysts’ reports, interview industry experts, and benchmark leading retailers and competitors. They’d produce forecasts and a recommended set of strategies, complete with ROI, and NPV calculations. They’d deliver it all in a PowerPoint presentation.

The design students would probably approach the project quite differently. They might begin with a similar trend analysis, but they would use it to develop scenarios of possible futures instead of spreadsheets. They would hang out in stores and talk to shoppers and employees, focusing on the shopping experience. They’d likely create some different customer personas and use the scenarios to try to model the changes in the personas’ lives – and, accordingly, in their shopping habits – over the next ten years.

Design thinking is a different way to approach common business problems, and it’s something both entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs need to explore, for their own business interests (growth), and for the experience their customers will have with them.

If you want to read more we are offering a chapter for free through CUPOLA, our new program that offers ebook sales on a chapter by chapter basis.

Paul Kahn’s book offers bracing yet troubling meditations on the four chapters of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Because Kahn aspires “to think with rather than think about” Schmitt, he necessarily dramatizes the limitations, and not only the value, of Schmitt’s way of theorizing politics and the sacred. In what follows, I affirm that value, as Kahn understands it, to some degree, but I also try to indicate the problems in Schmitt’s argument that he both repeats and elides, and the new problems that he creates.

What, then, in Schmitt’s text is worth reiterating? First, Kahn rightly emphasizes Schmitt’s claim that secularization has not abolished the sacred but entails, rather, its remaking and relocation: “Political Theology is best thought of as an effort to discover the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies on god.” Kahn thus elaborates Schmitt’s theory of the state and sovereignty as a modern site of the sacred: the point of political theology is not to endorse fundamentalism or subordinate the state to “religious doctrine or church authority, but to recognize that the state creates and maintains its own sacred space and history.” Second, Kahn is also right to emphasize how Schmitt’s articulation of “the political” is a credible and still necessary critique of “liberal political thought.” In this regard, he compellingly lays out Schmitt’s view of the dimensions of “the political” that are avoided by liberal thought but undeniably present in state practices and political experiences that liberalism lacks the vocabulary to acknowledge.

In the book Viefhues-Bailey examines conservative Christian rhetoric regarding marriage and the ways in which their arguments call for certain norms regarding gender and look to marriage as providing a basis for stability. Here is an excerpt from the chapter, “America and Respectable Christian Romance.”

On one side of the debate about marriage for same-sex partners, we hear the argument that Americans have the fundamental right to choose one’s life partner. As Alaskan judge Peter Michalski stated, “The relevant question is not whether same-sex marriage is so rooted in our traditions that it is a fundamental right but whether the freedom to choose one’s life partner is so rooted in our tradition.” Judge Michalski here relies on the romantic ideal of freely chosen love. Given how central this ideal is to the formation of a middle-class subjectivity and citizenry, it is clear that the state has an interest to protect and foster this freedom of choice.

However, the argument assumes that same-sex desire shapes itself according to the American codes of romance. In order to enter the arena of legal rights (and public acknowledgment), gay and lesbian relationships have to talk about themselves in a specific narrative script. And according to Mark D. Jordan, this is what happens increasingly:

“Identities for same-sex desires have been written by many regimes and their agents, including preachers, inquisitors, judges, and physicians. Today they get written increasingly by the purveyors of romance, those charming successors to the preachers, inquisitors, and physicians. They are . . . wedding preachers who want to preside over every coupling of ‘identical genitals.’ They do so not only by direct prescription, but by reinforcing romance in the imagined space of queer subculture.”

In the attempts to romanticize every instance of same-sex desire, a line is drawn to define what is and what is not appropriate. Only couplings that are embedded in truly romantic relationships count; neither the fleeting encounters between the massage therapist and the family man nor the ménage à trois involving partners of the same sex fulfills the script of romance. As in Evelyn Higginbotham’s analysis of black politics of respectability, entrance into the realm of acceptable desire involves adhering to a set of middle-class norms. These are the norms that make sexual desire into an instance of respectable romance.

Friday, June 24th, 2011

“It was once said that erotic literature is meant to be read ‘with one hand.’ Our misreaders of Jane Austen mistakenly think she writes about sex and love with both hands tied.”—Rachel Brownstein

In a recent essay for the Book Beast, Rachel Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?, challenges the notion of Jane Austen as prim, proper, and overly sentimental. Instead, Brownstein argues, Austen should be seen as offering a “complex, tough-minded view of love, life, and human nature” and a “a satirist of society, and of its notions of respectability.”

Brownstein writes:

[Austen's] novels are not, as some insist on thinking, the helplessly romantic effusions of a repressed spinster. French writers, coyly and salaciously, used to call erotic literature books meant to be read “with one hand”; contemporary non-readers and misreaders of Jane Austen wrongly imagine her as the respectable opposite of a pornographer, writing about sex and love with both her hands tied. She was in fact a satirist of society, and of its notions of respectability.

It was once said that erotic literature is meant to be read “with one hand.” Our misreaders of Jane Austen mistakenly think she writes about sex and love with both hands tied.

How presumptuous and ridiculous to “liberate” an uptight Austen from her hang-ups and deliver her into a cooler, looser, straighter-talking 21st century. Her view of human nature is as hard-eyed today as it was in her time. Using Austen as a prim and proper foil to radical, modern, sexualized “truths” is by now a tired, old trick—as is attempting to separate the men from the women, the pure from the impure, the divine from the diabolical, the high from the low, the sentimental from the clear-headed, and especially, the naughty (or is it nasty?) from the nice. The distinctions found within Jane Austen’s work are far truer and finer than that.

Kukis wrote the book to give Iraqis a voice as a way to counteract their under-representation in the U.S. media. He discovered that most Iraqis were genuinely glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein but fault the United States for many policies enacted during the occupation, particularly its disbanding of the Iraqi army.

Iraqis, Kukis believes now see many of the problems confronting the country as the responsibility of the Iraqi government even if they are a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Here are some excerpts from the interview in which Kukis considers how Iraqis view their future:

What does Iraq’s near-term future look like to them? Do you agree?

The near-term future looks rather bleak to many Iraqis, mainly because of the persistently high violence. No nation can think of itself as normal or stable when bombs kill and maim hundreds each year in the biggest urban areas. I believe Iraq will grow economically in the coming years and return to its status as one of the most developed and wealthiest nations in the Middle East. You can have economic growth and high violence at the same time.

But most Iraqis I suspect will find little solace in economic gains so long as violence endures at the current levels, and there is little to suggest it will be easing. So, yes, I tend to join those in Iraq with a fairly dim view of the future given the violence.

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Levy Hideo (Ian Hideo Levy, 1950–) is known as the first white American novelist to write in Japanese. His novel A Room Where The Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard: A Novel in Three Parts, which was just published, tells the story of Ben Isaac, a blond-haired, blue-eyed American youth living with his father at the American consulate in Yokohama. Chafing against his father’s strict authority and the trappings of an America culture that has grown increasingly remote, Ben flees home to live with Andō, his Japanese friend. Andō shows Ben the way to Shinjuku, the epicenter of Japan’s countercultural movement.

Levy was born to a Jewish American father and a Polish immigrant mother, he became an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Princeton University at twenty-eight. In this talk given at Stanford, Levy discusses language and identity of a writer as well as the difficulties and rewards of gaining the privilege of writing in the Japanese language as a culturally foreign writer.

As reported by Page Six, Zizek has struck up a friendship with none other than Lady Gaga! According to the article, “spent time together discussing feminism and collective human creativity. The pop star also agreed to support Zizek at a March rally in London when the lecturers’ union UCU was on strike.”

But what of my good friend Lady Gaga’s theoretical contributions? Certainly, there is a certain performance of theory in her costumes, videos and even (some of) her music. Nina Power has already noted that the infamous “meat” costume could be seen in reference, indeed, a performance of, Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.

Vanity Fair has followed up with news about another philosopher-pop star relationship: Ke$ha and Fredric Jameson. We’ll have to wait for more about the burgeoning flirtation between Justin Bieber and Julia Kristeva….

Finally, for those readers interested in both Marilyn Monroe and James Joyce, the above image is from James Joyce: A Critical Guide, by Lee Spinks.

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

In In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, Barry McCrea shows how the reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. This is particularly true, as McCrea shows, in Ulysses, wherein Stephen and Bloom, who meet each other as strangers develop a distinct kind of family. Below are excerpts from McCrea’s book that focus on the “Ithaca” chapter, which famously includes the question-and-answer format:

The narrative duty of marriages is to produce a new family, to incorporate the stranger in order to promise a reproduction, with a difference, of the basic structures of the present. As the English formula “happily ever after” and the French “ils eurent beaucoup d’enfants” clearly suggest, fairytale marriages are supposed to guarantee the future through biological fertility. “Ithaca,” as its Homeric correspondence implies, promises the new family of Ulysses, and the new vision of the world that it offers, as in a marriage plot, comes from a fusion of two strangers. In the case of Stephen and Bloom, instead of this promise about the future, we have a retrospective arrangement of the past. The combination of Bloom and Stephen offers no guarantees or even hints about the world to come but instead an exhaustive depiction of the world up to now….

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

“What do you do?” Joyce inquired. I told him about Shakespeare and Company. The name, and mine too, seemed to amuse him, and a charming smile came to his lips. (From Shakespeare & Company, by Sylvia Beach)

James Joyce and Sylvia Beach both liked to play with words. The name of her Paris bookstore, like T.S. Eliot’s “Shakespeherian Rag,” threw together the erudite and the everyday, bringing the bard down an affectionate peg or two (“my associate, Bill Shakespeare,” she calls him in one of her letters). Another of her coinages was “Bloomsday,” the spritely phrase she invented to commemorate June 16, 1904. It was the date on which James Joyce first stepped out with Nora Barnacle, and also, of course, the date on which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus stepped out in the pages of Ulysses (1922).

Joyce’s Irish epic, published just in time for his fortieth birthday, had Parisian roots as well as Dublin ones. “After years of wandering,” Beach told the Radiophonique Institut in 1927, Joyce “had come to France to finish his book, ULYSSES.” Paris was the spiritual home of the Irish artist in exile. Oscar Wilde, who died here in 1900, had established the standard. And Joyce, though not so direct a victim of the English courts, was a victim of English censorship, and sometimes he liked to adopt the Wildean pose. “‘Melancholy Jesus,’ Adrienne and I used to call him,” says Beach, and on his first visit to Shakespeare and Company, “he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde.” In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus declares that Wildean paradox could no longer sustain Irish art, but the image of the suffering Wilde held its fascination for Joyce.

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

“No matter if this was the actual face of Kristeva or not. For me, it was. And it was more than a face. It was the doorway into her words, her language, there on the page in plain sight, undisguised but still hidden.”

Here is an excerpt from the essay:

Winter term 1989—and I want to say that that’s when I fell in love with Julia Kristeva’s words. But first I fell in love with her face, or what I thought was her face. That’s more precise. I fell in love with the face on the cover a book of theory called Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, by Julia Kristeva, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. For no where in the book does it say just who is the woman on the cover. This was in 1989, pre-Web, and I was either too lazy or interested in preserving the mystery of Kristeva to track down print images of her to compare to the cover….

Reading too much Kristeva I found that my own spoken words became, for a short time, garbled as if in translation. When I became lost in the thicket of Kristeva’s words, which was practically all the time, I turned to the cover, to her face staring past the camera, contemplating escape, I thought. her eyes have just glanced something too beautiful and terrible for forget. Hell, perhaps. She is about to speak. Or else she has just spoken. Or else she is waiting, interminably, for an answer that will not satisfy her.

No matter if this was the actual face of Kristeva or not. For me, it was. And it was more than a face. It was the doorway into her words, her language, there on the page in plain sight, undisguised but still hidden….

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

Below are some excerpts from the interview. You might also want to visit the Facebook page for Living on Earth which includes listeners experience with eating dirt and pica.

GELLERMAN: So, why do people eat dirt?

YOUNG: That’s a very good question and it’s one I’ve been studying for the last decade or so. There are a number of explanations, and what we’ve found is that the best one, the one that fits the most of the observations that we’ve made is that it’s a protective behavior. So, clay is a big component of the earth that’s eaten. And clay is really good at binding, it almost acts as like a mud mask for your face, except it’s a mud mask for your gut in a way. It sucks up these pathogens like viruses and bacteria and harmful chemicals and lets them evacuate from your body without entering your bloodstream.

GELLERMAN: There’s something in the dirt that protects us?

YOUNG: Exactly. And what’s so, sort of, paradoxical about what we’ve found is that dirt can in fact be cleansing. People are really selective about the dirt that they eat. It’s not just any dirt, and the dirt that’s preferred is, well, often described as ‘clean dirt’. And it’s also very clay-rich, so what you find is very soft, malleable, it’s not like the sand you find at the beach, or the black humus-y kind of soil that you’d like to plant your tomatoes in.

GELLERMAN: I have a bag of dirt that we got from Sam’s General Store in White Plains, Georgia. It’s called ‘Grandma’s Georgia White Dirt’ and I just got it – it says: Not intended for human consumption, but I’m going to try it anyhow…

[BAG RUSTLING]

YOUNG: (Laughs).

GELLERMAN: It looks like chalk and it feels slippery…ooh it is… and it gets all over my hands.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Wallflower Press books. (For a listing of Wallflower books)

Columbia University Press has acquired worldwide rights to publish nearly 170 backlist titles from UK publisher Wallflower Press and will continue to publish approximately 15 new titles a year under the imprint named Wallflower Press beginning in September 2011 as a wholly owned imprint of Columbia University Press.

Dedicated to publishing high-quality peer-reviewed books in film studies, Wallflower Press was founded in London in 2000 by Yoram Allon. Columbia University Press has been its exclusive book distributor in North and South America. The addition of Wallflower Press’s list to Columbia University Press’s already prestigious and award-winning publications in film studies makes Columbia University Press today one of the largest publishers of academic books on film in English worldwide.

“As everyone knows, bookselling has had some tough years recently,” remarked Jim Jordan, president and director of Columbia University Press. “When Wallflower Press found itself unable to sustain business on their own after some financial setbacks, we decided to explore an alternative to losing a client that had served us well for ten years. Acquiring the publishing rights to their list and creating the imprint is the best way to keep Wallflower Press’s outstanding list around for years to come.”

Monday, June 13th, 2011

“Contrary to the main current of popular opinion today, Jane Austen’s novels are not first of all and most importantly about pretty girls in long dresses waiting for love and marriage.”

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review included a review of Rachel M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen?. The review praises Brownstein for her “excellent…overview of Austen’s ascent of the Olympian literary slope” and calls her “a superb critic, seen at her best when illuminating Austen’s mastery of significant detail.”

In the book, Rachel M. Brownstein considers constructions of Jane Austen as a heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author and the changing notions of these categories. She finds echoes of Austen’s insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, the commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims paradoxically to preserve and liberate, to correct and collaborate with old Jane.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

Contrary to the main current of popular opinion today, Jane Austen’s novels are not first of all and most importantly about pretty girls in long dresses waiting for love and marriage; and they are not most importantly English and Heritage, small and decorous and mannerly and pleasant. Read with any degree of attention, they do not work well as escape reading: there are too many hardheaded observations and hard, recalcitrant details in them. Only the powerful force of the courtship plot makes it at all possible to see the morose, depressed, self-involved, and boring Edward Ferrars as an acceptable husband; no more need be said about Edmund Bertram. Real evils are represented in all the novels—not only the unpleasantness of boredom, homelessness, and the governess trade and what Sense and Sensibility casually calls “the strange unsuitableness which often existed between husband and wife,” but also ruined lives, dangerous illnesses, urban riots, the slave trade, and foreign wars. Winston Churchill said he read Pride and Prejudice for respite while suffering from a fever and directing World War II, but even the “calm lives” of the characters in that brilliant comic novel are shadowed by envy, spite, foolishness, fraud, and, yes, at a distance, war.

Elvin Lim on The Sleaze Factor (one guess about which congressman the essay is about) at the Oxford University Press blog.

The University of California Press blog features Mary Helen Spooner’s essay which sheds light on the exhumation of former Chilean president Salvador Allende’s body, as well as the mysterious circumstances surrounding poet Pablo Neruda’s death.